Don't change phone laws

Published 5:23 pm, Friday, May 17, 2013

In the past few years, as Connecticut has been hit by one debilitating storm after another, each knocking out power for days or weeks at a time for thousands of residents, there has remained a mode of communication, albeit old-fashioned, that does not rely on our fragile power grid to keep people connected to the outside world.

The copper-wire telephone land line is the old standby of communications. Most people don't have one; any land line offered through a cable company is a more new-fangled version, just as vulnerable as anything else to power failures. As few as a third of state customers have a copper-wire phone line, and many use it only as a backup to their cellphones. But amid mass outages, they have proven their usefulness.

Given all the storms in recent years, it's hard to imagine a worse time for phone companies to urge the Legislature to de-emphasize the technology, old-fashioned though it may be. Yet that's exactly what companies are asking lawmakers to do.

A bill under consideration would allow the phone company to stop providing phone service that could be obtained from a competitor. In practice, that means anyone who has a land line with any added feature, like voice mail or call waiting, could be in trouble, with little notice that service would be cut.

Phone companies are obligated by law to provide a bare-minimum phone service, and so have argued that modernizing the law would put no one at risk. But the bill would also open the door to providing lower-quality service on these lines, in effect pushing people toward more advanced phone technology.

There's no compelling reason to make this change. The industry claims it will be unshackling, somehow, and lead to economic growth and more jobs. That optimism is hard to justify. Industry advocates also say, rightfully, that they're interested in adding customers, not dropping them. That's true, but it's undeniably the case that getting people to upgrade to a flashier, higher-profit model is in their interests, too.

Until more modern systems can prove that they can handle the most adverse conditions -- and that means providing a means of communication when the power is out for long stretches -- the oldest standby is necessary. The Legislature should not further deregulate the telecommunications industry.